Last week, we gave you a rundown on many of the features you’ll find in CyanogenMod 9, the custom ROM’s latest, Ice Cream Sandwich-based version. At the time, we noted that work was about to wrap up on preliminary releases, and hopefully we would soon be seeing a final version. Sure enough, the word’s now gone out that the project is freezing its main code branch, in preparation for the official arrival of CM9.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you’ve been following the alpha releases, you’ll noticed that the influx of new features will stop, with additional work on the code consisting of things along the line of bugfixes, as well as adding support for new translations.

Over the next few weeks, there should be a few CM9 release candidates coming out, eventually followed by the final version. There’s no word at the moment on just how many phones and tablets that release will support, but expect it to be a bit limited at first, so the team can assure a high degree of compatibility with those particular models.